Ed started up the Chevy’s engine, released the parking-brake, and slowly rolled away down the street, keeping his head down behind the door. Only when he was well around the corner did he sit up straight, and drive with howling tyres back to the highway, where the rest of the convoy were waiting.

‘Where’s Dyson?’ asked Della, as Ed stepped down. ‘Did he get us a car?’

‘He’s dead,’ said Ed. ‘There’s a sniper in one of the houses back there – hit him when he was trying to open a car door.’

‘A sniper?’ asked one of the farmhands, a tough little Nebraskan in faded overalls. ‘Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go smoke him out!’

Ed shook his head. ‘There’s no point. He’d probably pick off two or three of us before we could get anyplace near him. I don’t want anybody else dead, and that’s it. It’s serious enough, losing Dyson.’

‘What are we going to do about a car?’ asked a pale-faced woman, holding a sleeping two-year-old in her arms.

‘Well, we have a choice,’ said Ed. ‘Either you seven find somewhere to bed down for the night, and we’ll go on ahead and see if we can’t find another car for you, and send someone back with it; or else you can squeeze into the vehicles we have left.’

The woman said, ‘Mr Hardesty, I’d rather stay. We’ve been travelling all day, we’re exhausted. And, besides, if we leave now, we’re going to have to abandon all of our food, and I don’t think we ought to do that.’

‘She’s right,’ said her husband. ‘Who knows when we’re going to fend anything else to eat? We can’t afford to abandon fifty or sixty cans of meat It could keep us alive for weeks.’

Ed looked around at the other workers who had been travelling in the broken-down Mercury. Old Mrs Tilsley, who had given him fresh-baked cookies from her cottage window-sill when he was young, leaning on the arm of her grandson, Keith Perks; Henry and Susan Carlsson, who had come to work at South Burlington after their own farm in Dighton had gone bankrupt.